I’ve spent a fair bit of today trying to get this tutorial working. webdesignermag.co.uk. It’s supposed to make a poll and chart in Flash that connects to a MySQL database. I can’t get it to connect to my database though.

NB – I wrote this on 19/11/08 and then made lots of these ideas in flash. I’ve now reflected on them a bit so I’ll put my reflections below each idea I’ve done in italics. You’ll be getting action and reflection in one sweet sweet pill. Also, I’ve figured out a few bits of the php in that time and managed to get a version of the questionnaire online. I should add that the from isn’t yet linked anywhere. Click here to see it, though it’s likely to change every other day now. Today, it still needs design work doing on it. Maybe I should stick the flash files up here separately. Not sure about the best way of doing that. Okay, I’ll make an archive page somewhere. Soon.

I’ve just had a scribbling session thinking about how I’m going to make visual accompaniment for each question. Below is a pretty good typed version of that.

I’ve just spent a happy hour or three watching the tennis and knocking these new experiments together.
The squares are a continuation of the experiments with the butter and the ice. I’m thinking about units, boundaries and that kind of thing. I think I need to write quite a long post explaining what I mean in some depth if I’m going to start using words.

This one’s also very much in progress. I’m thinking a much more developed version of it could work as some kind of punctuation in my final piece. One thing I’m curious about with it is the fact that at the very start you have all of the alphabet layered on top of itself forming this very dense block. It reminds me of my old chum Derrida and his thoughts about the trace. That’s what English looks like when it’s all stacked up. It makes no sense. But that’s what we have to choose from. It’s almost like Michelangelo’s block of marble before he sculpted David. It makes no sense before someone picks bits out and forms them into words, but the potential of it is always infinite. Bit like the Big Bang, in a deeply non-scientific analogy kind of way. And now we have a situation where the language is still expanding and bits of it are changing and getting re-purposed, much like the wider universe. Anyway, ’tis late, fair reader, I must go to bed before I slip in to another rant.

PS – Sorry I just realised these two shouldn’t really be on the screen together at the same time as they’re a bit much to take in at once. If you can see them both, make your browser window smaller.

Here are a few points that should illustrate most of where my mind is with this…

1 – I think the words history, word and all are perhaps not quite equally important parts of my title but the first two shouldn’t be forgotten. I’d chosen them before I chose the word all, after all. I sometimes feel like I’m making a project about absolutely everything. I’m not. It’s about the history of a word. I want to look at the word’s use and misuse, with a view to examining language in the process. A significant part of this is looking at the images and ideas that flood into people’s minds when they hear the word. Which leads me on to part two of this post.